In
Right to Ride, Blair Kelley briefly
addresses the role of White people’s involvement in opposing racial segregation
regarding the streetcar boycotts. The actions of White residents had a
significant impact on the streetcar boycotts in both physical and ideological
ways. However, their actions did not lessen the extent of violence acceptable
to use against Blacks preforming similar actions.
White actions in resistance to streetcar segregation in the later
portion of the streetcar boycotts were relatively infrequent, but notable. The
importance of these occurrences lies in the fact that those with greater social
capital hold some responsibility for the condition of those with less, because
this imbalance results from hegemonic privilege accumulating from happenstance
of birth. With greater social capital comes increased political visibility. White elites are more likely to care about an issue when they believe it
can affect their status. While Blacks are relatively easy to discriminate
against (I say relatively due to the increasingly confusing colorism involved
in the border control of a mixed-race population), White radicals are less easily
distinguished and thus harder to control.
As
Mitchell identifies, segregation laws are a source of discomfort for both
Whites and Blacks. This illustrates the bottom-up movement gaining recognition
and support from a socially-divided society. Since Jim Crow society is a
reflection of legal and legislative regulation of social division on
interaction, the fact that each side of the division is moving toward unity
against that regulation indicates evolution in daily life. This evolution,
should it encompass enough of the society, should change top-down regulations.
The
combined impact of Black and White anti-regulatory displays on White leaders was
not upsetting enough to initiate a change in legislation resulting from the
streetcar boycotts, indicating that the movement failed to instill fear of
anarchic government deviations. Those with power only relinquish power when
they fear that to not “willingly” do so would result in an even greater loss of
power. Unfortunately, the Streetcar Boycotts did not upset the productivity of
the streetcars nor social elites to the extent that would cause this level of
fear. From this example, I think it can be concluded that fear is a necessity when upsetting social norms. In my opinion, this is yet another example of why violent protest is more effective than non-violent action because we cannot be forced to rely upon people with social power for a recognition of humanity.
There is an important question you raise in this post, "Why would people in power willingly give that up to those with less power?" Unfortunately, this willing transfer of power rarely takes place, thus, as you suggest, the rebalancing of power must be fought for.
ReplyDeletePeople with privilege can have a significant influence by leveraging that privilege for the transfer or rebalancing of power to those marginalized in our society.
You raise a really interesting point about the necessity of fear as a catalyst in effecting institutional change, and I tend to agree: it takes a powerful motivator to convince people to give up power or status, and human nature means that this motivating force is more frequently, and more effectively, self-interested fear than a sense of justice or compassion. However, I think you wrongly assumed a necessary connection between the instillation of fear and the threat of violence. One could argue that the threat of violence underlay every interaction between blacks and whites in America since the 1660s. In fact, it was in part the perceived threat to a slave-owning class outnumbered by the slaves themselves that prompted the construction of the violent institutions meant to secure their precarious dominance. In this way, the fear of violent opposition had sat near the center of the white supremacist psyche for generations and served to reinforce its structures and its assumptions.
ReplyDeleteI think the sense of fear instilled by non-violent protest, however, was much more fundamental: it tore at the very fabric of the white supremacist reality. This was a fear of losing power and control, not because it was unjustly wrested from them at the hands of misguided violent "brutes," but because they didn't deserve it--because people much like themselves had calmly and firmly asked for it and refused to take "no" for an answer. This can be seen not least in the astonishingly disproportionate brutality directed toward non-violent protesters in civil rights movements of any era (it'd be hard to argue that a man turning a firehose on a group of peaceful teenagers wasn't motivated at least in part by profound fear). All this is not to say that civil disobedience is only the valid form of protest, but rather that non-violent activism has sometimes proven to be an effective means of instilling the fear often necessary for effecting structural change.